Sexual psychopath (defined in the 1930s) was a category of criminals roughly defined as male sex offenders who had little to no control over their sexual impulses. The typology was built upon 19th-century Canadian psychiatrist Joseph Workman's five main categories of insanity. It was popularized in the United States during a moral panic regarding sex crimes that lasted from the late 1930s to the 1940s. The popularization of the sexual psychopath category in North America led to the creation of sexual psychopath laws in the United States and Canada.[1]
Sexual psychopath laws have been criticized for their lack of proper scientific basis. By the 1990s, most of such laws had been overturned or fallen out of use in the United States.[2][3]